The systematic design and analysis of tasks which can be implemented in first-year university courses and point to advanced inner- and extra-mathematically rich issues and their rationales is an open problem in the didactics of mathematics in higher education. Potentials of such tasks can be seen with regard to learning processes in the first year…

To remain globally competitive, education in the United States must focus on retaining students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). As laboratory courses have the potential to be powerful attractors or deterrents to a field, developing effective laboratory pedagogies is important to retain students in STEM. A course-based…

Researchers in physics education have advocated both for including modeling in science classrooms as well as promoting student engagement with sensemaking. These two processes facilitate the generation of new knowledge by connecting to one's existing ideas. Despite being two distinct processes, modeling is often described as sensemaking of the…

Most undergraduate students do not have practical experience working with model organisms despite having theoretical knowledge of their importance. This practical was developed to offer students experience working with three species of nematode, including "Caenorhabditis elegans." In the first task, students prepare slides of three…

A number of studies have found evidence for the so-called "ambiguity advantage," that is, faster processing of ambiguous sentences compared with unambiguous counterparts. While a number of proposals regarding the mechanism underlying this phenomenon have been made, the empirical evidence so far is far from unequivocal. It is compatible…

Research using the Anthropological Theory of the Didactic suggests different models of how student learning may evolve in the progression of undergraduate mathematics coursework: from elementary courses in Calculus to more advanced courses in Analysis. An ideal model suggests that the theory-driven learning in the latter serves as a natural…

Building scientific arguments is a central ability for all scientists regardless of their specific domain. In organic chemistry, building arguments is a necessary skill to estimate reaction processes in consideration of the reactivities of reaction centres or the chemical and physical properties. Moreover, building arguments for multiple reaction…

A word's exterior letters, particularly its initial letter, appear to have a special status when reading. Therefore, most orthographic coding models incorporate assumptions giving initial letters and, in some cases, final letters, enhanced importance during the orthographic coding process. In the present article, 3 masked priming experiments were…

Two broad approaches characterize the type of evidence that mediates recognition memory: discrete state and continuous. Discrete-state models posit a thresholded memory process that provides accurate information about an item (it is detected) or, failing that, no mnemonic information about the item. Continuous models, in contrast, posit the…

Addressing the disparate levels of aural skills that students may have acquired through their daily musical experiences prior to formal schooling can be difficult. Placement tests within the Western classical musical tradition typically involve structural decoding and formal concepts of elementary music theory. In this manuscript, we discuss the…

This study examined the role of relevance determinations within the context of undergraduates' multiple text reading and writing. In this study, undergraduate students were randomly assigned to one of two experimental conditions (i.e., to compose a research report about either the causes of or the solutions to the urban housing crisis), using a…

Theories of perceptual decision making have been dominated by the idea that evidence accumulates in favor of different alternatives until some fixed threshold amount is reached, which triggers a decision. Recent theories have suggested that these thresholds may not be fixed during each decision but change as time passes. These collapsing…

The current research addresses interesting and still mostly neglected question of how introductory philosophical disciplines (such as "Introduction to philosophy", "Introduction to ethics" etc.) affects students' comprehension of the concept of critical thinking which is one of the most important descriptive and normative…

Educational societies encountered rapid development in all fields of knowledge, assisted by the invention of new technologies and development of linguistic systems. Over time, researchers contribute to design well known instructional models such as traditional-based and inquiry-based models. However, the previous literature investigations showed…

This article reports on the second language (L2) perception of contrasts among British English monophthongs. This study has two aims: 1) to explore the discriminability of contrasts in L2 British English monophthongs; and 2) to test the perceptual assimilation model-L2 (PAM-L2) towards the ability to discriminate British English contrasts. The…